kingsleyxie / birthdayemail

:cake: Automatically send birthday card emails everyday

BirthdayEmail:cake:

This is a naive tool for organizations or associations to automatically send birthday emails:email: every day once connected with the member management system, more details or ideas can be found in my blog if you are interested.

Usage

Write configurations:pencil: in Tool/Config.php according to samples provided inside Tool/Config.example.php.

Run test file via command line to check whether text functions work properly:

$ php CLITest.php

Besides text related test results on screen, you should also see images/ directory:file_folder: is created, in which all the cards are generated using test names, with or without reference lines.

The alternative font will be chosen if there is text which the default font does not support.

Be aware that the database, email, and log functions are not tested now, you should test them via the actual working command shown below with 🔧TEST CONFIGURATIONS:

$ php index.php

Till now, if all seems to be fine, just change configurations to the production environment, and set the command as a timed task to crontab, for example:

0 11 * * * cd /path/to/directory/ && php index.php

In this example, the tool will automatically run at 11:00 🕚 every morning, generate birthday card and send email for each member that is celebrating a birthday.

If any error occurs, each email address in Config::$mail['error']['admin'] will receive an alert.

Notes

It is recommended NOT to deploy on the www-root🔗 directory on the web server since the operation runs under command line interface.

More significantly, there are directories that may contain privacy information:

• images/: All the birthday cards, every subdirectory is named by date
• logs/
  • data.log: Members' data from the database
  • mail.log: Name and destination of successfully sent emails
  • fail.log: Name, destination and error messages of failure operations

⚠️ So do remember to make accurate access control if it has to be deployed on the web folder, and rename index.php to some random string will be even better.

Dependencies

Special thanks to the dependencies:heavy_plus_sign: which helped a lot during the development:

• PHPMailer
• FontLib